Philosophy 103: Ethics

Reading list 2024–25

Essays should be shorter than 2,000 words (preferably closer to 1800 words) and ideally submitted as Microsoft Word files, which allows me to make use of Word’s comment function.

I. Love

Love is a near-universal experience and gets a huge amount of cultural attention, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand. In particular, it is hard to say just what love consists in, to explain what rationalises it (if anything does), and to make sense of its relationship to morality. Does it essentially and distinctively involve wanting to be with someone, or wanting things to go well for them? Is it fundamentally arational, or is it a rational response to a person’s good qualities, or their values, or their personhood? Is it in tension with morality or does it somehow belong to it?

This week we focus on the question whether love is justified by reasons or not, though many of the authors also offer views about what love is. (You can find work more focused on the latter question in the further reading.) Several of the arguments we consider this week invoke considerations that will have a part to play in our discussions in subsequent weeks.

Question: Is love rational?

II. Kant: acting from duty

Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is perhaps the greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western philosophical tradition, and certainly one of that tradition's great peaks. It is dazzling in its creativity, in its technical ingenuity, and in its ambition—although it can also seem forbidding, thanks to Kant's difficult style. From an analysis of everyday moral thinking that identifies the notion of a good will at its heart, Kant proceeds to argue that our very freedom depends on conforming to the moral law. On the way, he introduces ideas of universalisation and humanity as ‘an end in itself’ that have great resonance even for many of those who reject Kant's theory.

Question: Is Kant right to conclude that only action from duty has moral worth?

III. Scanlonian contractualism

Scanlonian contractualism is a non-consequentialist moral theory according to which an act is wrong if and only if it is disallowed by a principle that no one could reasonably reject who was motivated to find such principles. Developed in the second half of the 20th century by T.M. Scanlon, it has become enormously influential in contemporary ethical theorising. Its key attraction is in the way it captures the idea that permissible actions must be acceptable from all reasonable points of view. But there are doubts about whether the theory is genuinely explanatory, about whether its avoidance of the unpalatable conclusions associated with consequentialism is gerrymandered, and about the way it handles risk, among other things.

Question: Does contractualism offer a compelling account of wrongness?

IV. Virtue ethics

According to one narrative about modern moral philosophy, it was by the end of the 19th century regarded as a contest between two ‘methods of ethics’: deontology and consequentialism. The 20th century saw the revival of a third method, inspired by classical Greek ethics. This third method has come to be known as ‘virtue ethics’. It makes the notion of a virtue theoretically central, displacing the deontological emphasis on duties or rules and the consequentialist focus on assessment of acts by reference to the good that they produce instrumentally. Critics argue that virtue ethics fails to be action-guiding, or that it is fundamentally unattractively egoistic, or that it's not really a distinctive method of ethics at all, among other objections.

Question: Are virtue ethicists right to make virtue fundamental in ethical theory?

V. Internal and external reasons

Can we have reasons to do things—that is, normative reasons rather than motivating reasons—even if we do not have any desires or concerns at any level that are furthered by acting in accordance with them? An influential essay by Bennard Williams effectively answers “no”, defending the view that all practical reasons are what he calls ‘internal reasons’. But if Williams is right, then it seems that many practical reasons that seem obviously to apply to us are in fact surprisingly fragile—not least moral reasons.

Question: Are there external reasons?

VI. The authority of morality

One of the most abiding questions in moral philosophy is: “why be moral?” This question presses us to find a reason that would be sufficient to persuade a sceptic (the ‘amoralist’) to comply with moral requirements. Of course, sometimes the sceptic's self-interest will favour doing the morally right thing anyway, but that doesn't seem to be the kind of reason we are seeking. Some try to show that moral reasons are constructed from self-interested reasons; others doubt that the question even makes sense. This week, we try to get to grips with the question, and we consider various strategies for addressing it.

Question: Why should I be moral?

VII. Blame

Many have been suspicious of blame, seeing it as too close to an expression of a desire for vengeance to be morally respectable. Philosophers sympathetic to blame have accordingly been moved to defend it. Defences have appealed to its valuable effects, to the role it plays in interpersonal relationships, and to the way it partly constitutes others for us as free. But perhaps these defences depend on blame’s being understood as less vindictive than it really is.

Question: How should we understand blame? Would we be better off without it?

VIII. Hypocrisy

Hypocrites attract widespread moral condemnation and are also widely thought in some sense to lack standing to criticise or blame others. But it's proven surprisingly difficlt to explain just what justifies the condemnation and why (and in what sense) they lack standing. This week we consider a range of accounts of hypocrisy and hypocrites’ standing (or lack of it). As it turns out these different accounts also shed light on the nature of morality and moral relations.

Question: What's wrong with hypocrisy, and why do hypocrites lose their standing to blame?